


American Death Note

by Kehuan



Category: Death Note & Related Fandoms, Death Note (2017)
Genre: AU of an AU, Fix-It, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 05:03:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kehuan/pseuds/Kehuan
Summary: The US-based NetflixDeath Noteadaptation was bad. But I remain convinced that you could do an entertaining and distinctly localized take on the source material. So, welcome to the lighthearted skeleton of what is effectivelyDeath Note: American Class System Thinkpiece Edition, where Light is a middle-class striver, Mi[s]a would totally Death Note the guy who killed Cecil the Lion, and L is upset about structural injustice. It assumes some loose knowledge of the original story, and none whatsoever of the movie, except that I've used its character names.





	American Death Note

"Where's Ryuk?" asked Deridovely, as the wind whistled around his tattered bandages in the Shinigami Realm.

Gukku shook his bowl of bones and looked at the results in disgust. "I'll win the next round, just watch," he said. "And I think he's down in the Human World."

Deridovely looked over the desiccated hills toward the portal into the Human World, the only spot of color in the death gods' dull, mummified realm. Few of them bothered gazing into it much anymore — except for lucky Ryuk, it usually ended badly when they did. "Again?"

"He dropped another Death Note," Gukku sighed, clacking exposed antelope's jawbones. "You know how he always gets with those."

Deridovely laughed, spreading his lips wide beneath his featureless mask. "Oh, mister 'humans sure are interesting', you mean?"

"Yeah," Gukku said. "You'd think he'd be bored watching them kill each other by now. Heaven knows, it feels like all they ever do. Just once I'd like to see one who doesn't go ax-crazy the moment their grubby little hands touch the cover."

"I know, right? I understand it. But I'm just so _over_ death."

"You and me both," said Gukku. "You and me both. Now, will you go ahead and make your roll already?"

~*~

The notebook on the lawn looked like a hard black Moleskine, extra large squared. Light knew this because it was the model that he found most productive for AP journaling; he credited its wide spacing for the straight fives he had gotten on every exam. He detoured toward the book casually; it wouldn't do for someone to think he — _Light Turner_ , sterling 5.0 GPA holder and valedictorian of HYP Prep Academy's senior class — thought he could benefit from looking at someone else's work.

Light turned the cover over with his toe, sneaking a glance across the quad for spies or cameras. This was exactly the kind of situation some jealous classmate might rig to compromise him, and in the heat of college admissions, that sliver of doubt might be the difference between a glowing teacher's recommendation and the sort of mediocre pablum that filled the slush bin of lower-tier Ivies.

But there appeared to be no cameras, and the notebook had no name or subject inked across its front page. Instead, there was only a series of scratchy block letters:

D E A T H   N O T E

Light's mind spun for other tricks that might be being played at his expense. But curiosity overcame his caution, and he plucked it from the ground.

_How to use it_ , he read, printed in tacky sarif script. _The human whose name is written in this note shall die._

How clever, he chuckled to himself, sliding the notebook into his soft charcoal messenger bag. He could always use a thought experiment.

~*~

If Ryuk had believed in higher gods than him, he might have thanked them for Light Turner. Some people had to have the Death Note's rules practically beaten into them, but Light was a real self-starter: he'd thought through every detail and tested out combinations that Ryuk had never thought of. Humans sure were interesting!

Light had gotten plenty of use out of it, too. He'd started out with an active shooter on local news, then tested the Note on the rolls of several high-profile supermax prisons, before automating a scraping tool (a kind of strange human rulebook he'd explained to Ryuk at some length) to batch-process police blotters and print the names on sticky paper in super-small lettering, while Light stared at a matching grid of mugshot photos. Well, Ryuk _had_ said they could be written with anything.

If Ryuk had one worry, it was that Light's kills were going to start getting monotonous, because the kid was all tactics and no strategy. He was going to rid the world of bad people, and bad people were criminals, and that was that. Ryuk had a policy of never offering advice on these things, but just once he wished for a little bit of risk: an old Nuremberg escapee, a white-collar profiteer, a tinpot dictator or two. Maybe a governor or senator, or the president. What kind of red-blooded patriot never thought about assassination?

Light hadn't, apparently. Oh, well.

~*~

True to his reputation as the world's greatest detective, L put the pieces together before anyone else. The WHO was worrying about a new thread of staph, and the CDC thought it was cholesterol in prison food. No one else saw the viciously human logic behind the whole thing. Or, more specifically, the coldly automatic logic. Cross-referencing the names revealed a perfect match with thousands of mostly English-language arrest records, the deaths mere hours after their publication. L called in a favor and had a small Wisconsin county police department scramble its text, photos, and dates for a week. He might not be able to wrap his head around the method, but his suspicions were confirmed: when a matching name and face went over the wire, a heart attack was imminent.

L notified Interpol first, because one of his alter-egos had just helped them bust a Silk Road copycat. But that was just covering bases. The killings had a distinctly American provincialism, and the deaths fell into standard East Coast timing, clustered in the early morning and late afternoon. Percentages ticked in his head: _a student?_

There had to be some way to draw them out.

~*~

In the days after a crazed knife-wielding fan dropped dead right in front of her, people asked Mia whether her life had flashed before her eyes. Mia made up something vaguely spiritual, but the truth was, she had never believed she was going to die. Not that she had a plan, or anything — things just tended to work out for her. Chalk it up to luck.

The near-death experience had faded into the monotony of parties and brand activations when a notebook showed up in her mother's East Village penthouse, and a fanged skeleton woman who called herself Rem followed after, saying something about love and death gods. _Huh,_ Mia thought. _I guess antidepressants cause psychosis after all._

She'd waved off her hallucination for a few days, until her friend's phone pushed a live news alert during an early dinner uptown at Dorsia. Stepping outside, they watched a tinny-looking Justice Department logo fill the screen. What was CNN doing these days?

Death on live TV — that's what it was doing. The death of someone named Lind L. Tailor, who was confusingly _not_ the entity known as L, whose masked voice began taunting someone he called only "the killer." Mia's friend rolled her eyes and blanked the screen. "More fake news," she groaned, half-ironically. But all Mia could think of was Tailor clutching his chest, just like her stalker. And one of the rules in that gimmicky goth book: _If the cause of death is not specified, the person will simply die of a heart attack._

The next few days, her social feeds filled up with explainers: "The mass criminal killer's victims, in one chart;" "Here's why the letter L is suddenly so popular;" "The name 'Kira' is cultural appropriation — so why do we keep using it?" But by then, Mia knew the score. She had the playbook. And she was ready to join the game.

~*~

Light had developed a 43-step gambit for unmasking L. The thing was foolproof. He'd made a flowchart, for crying out loud. And it was all rendered pointless by some stupid girl.

Worse, he didn't realize the girl existed until she tapped him on the shoulder and introduced herself as Mia Sutton, hedge fund heiress and minor Instagram celebrity. They'd both showed up to a blatantly obvious FBI trap — he'd gotten the scoop from his dad, who was consulting with L himself, based on a hack of his laptop. She apparently walked right into the stakeout, but the moment agents started closing in, one of them pulled a gun and went rogue, before turning the weapon on himself. Mia sauntered away, ignored in the confusion.

_Wait._ She couldn't have known the names beforehand. She'd only seen their faces. How had she still killed them?

Mia had gotten some kind of cheat code from her own monster, a tag that showed her other people's names. Light had spent hours scouring records for L's name — hours that he could ill afford between classes, sports, and running a volunteer group that taught orphans how to code. (After all, each lost moment dropped his odds of standing out in the crowd of white suburban Harvard applicants.) All Mia would have to do was show up. She and L probably even went to the same parties or something.

"Why didn't you tell me about it?" he railed at Ryuk later. "All this time, and I could have just _looked_ at somebody to kill them? I could have gone crimefighting, Ryuk! Like Batman!"

Ryuk, balanced delicately on the edge of one of Light's trophies, shrugged. "Where would be the fun in that?" he said. "Besides, you still have to write their name in the Death Note. And I didn't think you'd want to give up half your life for it."

"Mia seems okay with it."

Perhaps "okay" was the wrong word. Mia simply didn't seem cognizant of the fact that bad things could ever happen, maybe because they never _had_ , not to her. Why should her own death feel real? Her family had spent decades getting out of devil's deals.

L showed up at Light's jai-alai practice a week later, no doubt hoping to catch Light off balance. It would be trivially easy to kill him now, as long as he could get Mia to introduce herself. But as all Light's tightly knotted plans frayed into nothing, the notion was a hollow victory.

~*~

There were two Kiras. Maybe more, but at least two. The original killed suspected criminals with clockwork efficiency. The other struck randomly and almost petulantly: a state legislator after a nasty gaffe, the head of a guerrilla child soldier unit, a musician who insulted a fellow pop star.

L tried not to measure the outrage over the former versus the latter. It was hard enough seeing how many people weren't outraged at all. Not just the usual online teen sociopaths, but respectable men and women who genuinely didn't seem to see the harm. Kira is a monster, they might say. But he's _our_ monster. It didn't hurt that anyone who condemned Kira too strongly had a habit of meeting a nasty death, usually leaving a shakily penned apology behind.

It was harder having almost certainly identified the original Kira, and being totally unable to prove it. Light was too smart to leave any fresh leads, and L had resorted to keeping him as close as possible, hoping at least to stall the deaths.

But perhaps the hardest thing of all was seeing someone hold absolute power and do so little. Yes, crime had dropped under Kira, the way it might under any totalitarian regime. He might make the odd example of some obvious creep who'd gotten off light with a slick lawyer or a bad judge. But for the most part, all Kira had done was mirror the worst of the justice system at a vast scale.

Sometimes, chewing idly at a handful of candies, L would catch himself making his own list of names. The executives whose mass murders would go unpunished, because they were only slow impersonal deaths from denied medications or reckless chemical spills. The sadistic police he'd worked with who would never face the law, because they were the law. The villains who couldn't be unmasked by a brilliant detective, because the world had seen their true faces, and accepted them as a necessary — or even entertaining — evil.

And sometimes, yes: Light Turner.

~*~

It was annoying how cautious Light had been about introducing her to L, Mia thought. He had some long speech about how she couldn't tip off the police by killing him right away, which Mia tuned out halfway through. Light might be gorgeous, but he spent so much time worrying about the little things. Their team-up had been so exciting at first: his methodical schemes, her touch of panache. Now it was all spreadsheets and algorithms. Was liberally prescribing Schedule II drugs as bad as illegally dealing them? Were public deaths more effective deterrents than private ones? God, who cared?

Maybe it was time their little partnership dissolved.

When Light finally rigged a meeting at a coffee shop, Mia thought he'd gotten things wrong. L barely looked older than she did, hunched over a towering concoction topped with whipped cream. No wonder he never went on TV.

Mia savored the brief look of fear when she looked above L's head, introduced herself — "Kira, haven't you heard?" — and casually dropped his name. But that wasn't the point of their meeting. "I could kill you," she said conversationally, plucking a piece of candied orange from his drink. "But I don't want to kill you." She leaned forward, until she could see the strangely dilated pupils of his eyes. He was no longer afraid of her, she thought. He looked, if anything, fascinated. "I want to make a deal."

~*~

Had L missed some kind of clue about Mia Sutton? He prided himself on deduction, but maybe he'd still mistaken a pretty face for an innocent one. No matter; she was here now, and she had changed everything. She was also talking very, very quickly, in a tangled valley-girl lilt.

"So you're... offering to kill Light. You're offering to not kill me. And in exchange, you want me to let you _keep_ killing, because you'll kill fewer people than Light does. Is that everything?"

"Not just _fewer_ people," Mia sighed. "Higher-quality people. Truly _hated_ people. I'm not some boring death clerk like he is, L. I know how to play a crowd. Want me to do that obnoxious drug company guy?"

"Please don't. Besides, why should I think you'll kill Light? You two sound... close."

Mia united her impossibly long eyelashes, like Venus flytraps. "Because he thinks I'd never do it."

"What?" Part of it was an act, L decided. She was an inverted yandere; a mad, gothic broken doll; any other archetype that allowed a violent woman to be considered alluring and safely contained. But the violence... that was real.

"You're right — I love Light. I think he loves me. But that's the problem. Light can't respect anything he loves. He has to feel stronger, to feel like I'm looking up to him, not competing with him. And he really is dead tedious, you know. I don't know how you spend so much time with him."

"I don't think he's tedious," L snapped, before stopping himself. It was irrational to defend Light, just because he thought of him as a worthy opponent — and because if he hadn't been a killer, L might have considered him a kindred spirit. Either way, Mia might well destroy either of them with a thought, or whatever it was she did. All he could do for now was buy time. "Okay. I have a 30 percent chance of entertaining this proposition," he said. "But you have to show me how it works."

~*~

Mia must be developing better taste in men, Rem thought. Even if this one could barely look in Rem's direction — though he wasn't afraid of _her_ , Rem suspected, but of the absurdity and unknowability she represented.

"If you try to hurt her, I'll kill you," she said, regardless.

He nodded wearily. "I've started hearing that a lot."

Mia was still scouring the news for targets. Rem motioned for L to sit.

"Where do they come from?" L asked finally. "The notebooks."

"I don't know," Rem said. "Most shinigami don't spend as much time questioning their existence as humans."

"That's disappointing."

"When you already know your purpose, it's less attractive," Rem said. "What point would there be to knowing why we kill, or who made us to do it? We kill, we must kill, and we have always killed. It's you humans who take so much pleasure from the act of it — almost obscene."

"Not all of us."

"No human who's ever picked up Ryuk's Death Note has failed to use it, or so he tells me. Would you refuse one, if I offered?"

"Are you offering?"

Rem smiled slowly. "Let's say that I am."

She expected a glib rebuttal, or flustered protest. Instead he wrapped his arms around his knees and stared at the floor for a long time, as Mia scrolled through yet another page of potential victims.

"Yes," he answered. "If you put it in my hands right now, there is a 45 percent chance that I would take it. But to be so sure of a death that I would write it down, unilaterally... that number will never be high enough."

"Even Light Turner's?"

"...Even his."

L asked Mia to go out for some brand of sweet Rem had never heard of, but suspected would be inconvenient to find. Mia left, laptop still open on a grid of search results.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" he asked Rem, as soon as they heard Mia's footsteps on the stairs. "No matter whether it's you, or her, or Light who does it."

"If you won't kill, or let her kill for you... yes, probably."

Rem watched him chew at the corner of one fingernail, focused on something in the distance. "Then I'm sorry, but excuse me," he said, drawing a piece of metal-tipped plastic ( _thumb drive_ , Rem's memory of human technology supplied) from his pocket. "I've got a lot of evidence to collect."

"This will incriminate her, won't it?"

"I assume so. Her and Light."

"And you know what I've promised if you hurt her."

He hesitated. "Yes," he said. "If you're going to do it, there's no point putting it off. I'll leave it in your hands."

L plugged the drive into Mia's computer, opening a black box to type something Rem couldn't understand. Rem looked on, motionless, her single eye narrowed. "Humans... well, I won't say you're interesting," she said. "But some of you are less boring than others."


End file.
